Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  He could not ignore the sensation of something pulling at him, like an invisible wire tied around his waist, or as if he were a bird returning to its roosting ground. That pool was beckoning him back and guiding him truer than any compass.

  In the morning Sheriff Groves stirred against his horse. Gideon stopped and got down and poured water onto the lawman’s face. His mouth was a wreck, and his eyes were swollen nearly shut. The water sputtered from his nose and mouth. He drank some and muttered unintelligible words.

  “Not long now,” Gideon said. He stroked Sheriff Groves like a pet and poured water over the cuts on his scalp to clear away the flies biting at the wounds.

  They rode through the morning. The horses lowered their heads to the heat. By midday they reached the end of the desert dunes and entered the white hogback hills arranged before the Oscuras. Gideon soon felt the same deadening as they passed from a world of vitality to a world of stillness.

  This uncanny landscape, where even the wind was timid, was disliked by the horses. They fought the reins, and Gideon’s mount even reared up in an effort to throw him from its back. He climbed down and led both reluctant horses toward the black rock. For a moment, atop one of the symmetrical mounds of rock and sand, Gideon thought he saw the white dog standing sentinel.

  No. It was only some wild animal that retreated from sight. There was nothing else but spilling gypsum sand and rocks atop the hill. Not even the tiniest scrap of brush grew this close to the entrance into the canyon.

  Gideon guided the horses through the hollow and into the shadowed valley. Sheriff Groves awoke, lifted his head, struggled against his bonds, and began to moan piteously at the sight of the abandoned pueblo city.

  “It is quite unnerving, I agree,” said Gideon. “Who built this? Where did they go? Why would they leave such a city standing empty?”

  They reached the terraces. Sheriff Groves stretched to see the extent of the pueblo. Weak as a babe, he quivered to hold up his head. His beaten face was glued with blood.

  Gideon laid a heavy rock atop the leads of the horses to tie them down. He thought, for a moment, that he detected the sound of claws echoing on the canyon rocks. He listened but heard nothing else. He lifted Sheriff Groves from the back of the mare and slung the bound lawman over his shoulder. Blood smeared pink and red on the horse’s coat and mixed with the animal’s sweat where Sheriff Groves had laid his head.

  “I am afraid this will be an unpleasant journey,” said Gideon.

  It surely was. He dragged, pushed, and pulled Sheriff Groves up to the terrace where the cave entrance burrowed into the black rock of the mountain. Sheriff Groves was helpless to protect himself from the rocks he cracked his head against and the jagged edges that cut into his flesh. A few spots were nearly vertical climbs, and for these Gideon had to scale the rock ahead of Sheriff Groves and drag him up by tying the hemp rope around his chest.

  He brought Sheriff Groves to the very entrance of the dark cave. He set the lawman up against the rock face so that he could look down at the valley below. Gideon descended again, unloading the supplies he had brought—clothes, food, and jugs of water—into a secret cache he had prepared days earlier. This he concealed close to the ladders, and Sheriff Groves had no way of knowing its exact location even if he were paying careful attention, which, Gideon suspected, he was not.

  Gideon was tired, and so he drank and ate, and still the sheriff did not stir from where he was left beside the cave. Gideon fetched the sack containing the sheriff’s nasty little mutt, and he took this down into the depths of the earth. He saw the pool for the first time by the light of a lantern. It was serene and receptive. Eager.

  He threw the sack containing the sheriff’s dead dog into the pool. It stuck for a moment in the gluey white and moved as if pulled from beneath. It disappeared beneath the liquid’s surface.

  Minutes passed. Gideon sweated through his shirt and drank water from a clay pot. After what must have been several minutes the pool began to bubble. The embryonic sack heaved up with unexpected force and slid up from the pool to rest upon the stone. Gideon cut the sack open, unsurprised to discover the snout and matted fur of the dog within.

  After several seconds it began to slide back into the pool, attached by a web of tissue to the surface of the liquid. Gideon recalled what happened to the Indian. Rather than allow the unconscious dog to be resorbed, he cut it free and lifted it to safety. It awoke and made a mess upon the floor. It seemed to have trouble standing at all. Its eyes were wild and fearful, but it seemed too confused to fight against him. If it had any memory of Gideon it did not show it.

  “I’m sorry for this,” he said, and he broke the animal’s neck. He waited. Nothing more occurred. No replacement dog issued from the pool.. He threw the dead dog again into the pool, but it did not reemerge.

  The water did not favor dead things. Could it sense the absence of consciousness? Gideon could not know whether God or science churned in the pale liquid, but there were clearly rules at work. Life could not be restored to the dead if they were not alive when they fell into the pool. An Indian could be made from only his blood, but his soul was not preserved. A dead dog was spit back out with no apparent memories of its previous life. But Gideon was reborn no matter where or how he perished.

  But how often? wondered Gideon.

  He undressed and neatly folded each item of clothing and placed them in a pile beside the pool. He left the cave and kicked Warren until he awoke. He stood naked before the battered lawman and took the time to indicate his various injuries and describe the agony of his terrible sunburn. Sheriff Groves did not look at him.

  “I would lecture you on faith, and mine you wrenched from me and debased for three years, but by your state I fear we do not have that luxury. Warren Groves, I have again found faith. I believe in a very specific miracle. I believe in the Resurrection. Mine. First you will witness, then we will see if you can share in the miracle.”

  Gideon picked up the revolver he had brought for this moment and stepped to the edge of the cliff, many feet from the sheriff.

  “Watch closely,” said Gideon.

  He placed the barrel of the gun against his own throat, angled the revolver so that the bullet should kill him instantly, and pulled the trigger. The gunshot echoed in the valley and along an unseen filament, and Gideon perceived the motion of his fall from the cliff. He was light as smoke exhaled from through the hole in his head. His body plummeted away from him to break upon the rocks below, and he was an urge, already moving at great speed, past the hues and objects of the world.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Gideon Long’s body fell out of sight and boomed against the stones beneath the terraced pueblo. Warren heard the meat slapping and tearing across the rocks. The noise described the wet loops of entrails slithering out from burst seams. The strangeness of this dream made him sick and he leaned his head against the stone and tried to close his eyes. They were so swollen he could not open or close them completely.

  There was oppression to the undisturbed blue uniformity of the sky. A painted fraudulence. It added to Warren’s suspicion that he was dreaming or dead. He had crossed the white sands and moved through silent foothills and into a canyon where nothing moved. He was racked with pain when he was not unconscious. This world could not be real. He was passed out drunk or asleep and dreaming or killed on the floor of his kitchen by the maniac claiming to be Gideon Long.

  The boiled stench of a man’s insides emptied and cooking over sunned rocks began to rise. The horses did not like it and Warren was glad to hear them whinnying and struggling against their ropes. They were real enough and horses meant there might be some escape.

  That was for later. He was too tired to even struggle much against his binding. He attempted to push himself up along the wall of rock to at least stand. His legs were too weak. There were too many injuries to give preference to any particular agony. Several ribs broken. His jaw and nose broken. Teeth knocked out or snapped into pieces. He
suspected by the pain in his guts that he was bleeding inside. He knew from cattle drives that a man kicked in the side by a horse could die as surely as a man kicked in the face.

  He rolled onto his side on the ground and drooled blood into the dust. Something moved. Some animal was coming. He lifted his head and saw the pale spirit of a creature. A big white dog came slowly and confidently up the terrace ramp. Its eyes were glittering blue like the sapphire he’d found in Annie’s secret box. By the look it was a Navajo mongrel with ears pricked straight up and long and powerful legs. More shorthaired wolf than the sort of animal white men kept.

  Warren tried to call out to the dog. Discovered he could not speak more than an inarticulate blowing of spit and blood. It came closer anyway and snuffled its nose at the air and the ground.

  He was not afraid. There was so little sense to what was transpiring that his last concern was being mauled further by a ghost dog.

  The dog loomed over his head with the sun behind it and its white fur now seemed gray. Its eyes still shone. Its pink tongue slid out from its muzzle and lapped the blood on his forehead. It took only one taste and backed away slowly. Warren tried to speak again. The dog loped off down the terrace ramp and out of sight.

  He rolled onto his back and listened for the dog and managed to become unconscious without closing his eyes. He awoke to someone calling his name and he tried to sit up. His injuries prevented that and he fell back again and stared up at the daylight sky.

  “Good thinking,” said the voice. “You have certainly earned a good rest. Let me get some clothing on, and I will show you to your destiny.”

  Gideon Long appeared after many minutes and he wore the clothing he’d left folded by the cave. He was pale and fit and there was no sunburn or scabs. No gunshot wound or spilling entrails.

  He lifted Warren up by his bound wrists and walked him over to the cliff. Warren seethed with anger and found he could hardly even give his rage a voice. He drooled and spit and was carried to the edge of the cliff by his captor.

  “Now, now,” said Gideon. “Have a look down there.”

  The naked body of Gideon Long was a hundred feet or more below. It was twisted across a dagger of black stone. Its face was upturned and unmistakably that of the maniac Gideon Long who had attacked him and kidnapped him from his home.

  “Witness my lifeless body,” said Gideon. “What an appalling mess. Who knew I contained such a quantity of giblets? Now, look at me, standing beside you. It is impossible, and yet here I am, alive and whole. Injuries and infirmities repaired.”

  Warren croaked in anger.

  “Why? Is that what you’re asking? I do not pretend to know why I am blessed with this strain of immortality, nor by what biology or mechanism it operates, only that it does. There is a Stygian pool deep within the volcanic bowel of this mountain.”

  Gideon patted Warren on the shoulder and dragged him back from the edge of the cliff and into the darkness of the cave.

  “It devours a man and remakes him. It will swallow up anything but gold. I will take you there so that you can believe.”

  Warren dug his heels in against the rocks. Gideon easily overwhelmed him and pulled him into the cool darkness of the cave. Deeper and deeper, and as the heat and moisture grew, Warren knew what it was to be swallowed and consumed by a beast of geologic scale and lifespan.

  He was brought at miserable length to a cavern large enough to consume the lantern’s light. Warren fell and had to be pulled along on his back down a steep slope. Pale trailings of minerals formed thousands of stalactites upon the surface of the domed ceiling. Narrow chimneys in the rock cast dim pink and yellow beams across the sloping chamber. Gideon was dragging him to the center of the chamber. He ignored the pain and turned his head and could see black circle there suggesting a well or some deeper passage.

  The closer Gideon pulled Warren to the fissure the more a stench of rotting meat and sour wounds permeated the air. Warren didn’t want to go near it and began to fight and kick to free himself from the hands holdings his arms. Gideon laughed at him. It was a feeble effort and tired Warren almost immediately. Gideon dragged him the remaining distance to the hole.

  “Here we are,” said Gideon.

  He rolled Warren onto his belly so that he lay upon the warmed rocks and his head dangled over the rim of the hole. Here the smooth rock fell away in a steeply conical depression that opened into a circular pool five or six feet across. The liquid of the pool was so full with minerals that it had the appearance of white mud. It reminded Warren of the batter Annie used for biscuits.

  Could Gideon have told the truth? Was this underground pustule the gateway to eternal life? Warren tried to force himself up with his hands. Gideon pressed with his boot against the small of Warren’s back. The pain was so excruciating that Warren nearly blacked out.

  “Good,” Gideon said. “It still hurts. I want you to feel it all. It is quite painful. Look at it, Warren Groves.”

  Gideon stepped from Warren’s back and lifted him up by his armpits. He pressed his cheek to Warren’s and spoke through clenched teeth. “Before, at your house, I meant to teach you a lesson with my knife. To murder you. But why murder a man who wants to die? No. I deny you. Live with your guilt.”

  Gideon shouted and hurled Warren down the slope. He rolled down the smoothed rocks and found no purchase with his searching fingers. He splashed into the pool. The thick liquid surrounded his arm and leg, and he was dragged deeper.

  “You heard her songs every day and did not know them.” Gideon peered down from the edge of the pit. “I damn you, Warren Groves. Live forever.”

  The liquid closed over Warren’s face, and the strange light of the cavern faded quickly. He felt as though he were sinking with heavy weights around his legs. The liquid was becoming hotter and hotter. It was intolerable. The heat etched his flesh like acid. It scoured the clothing and hair from his body and devoured his flesh, and when he screamed, it filled his mouth and throat and lungs and saturated his every tissue in histological violence.

  Protean grit scoured his bones and poured into his sightless sockets. The liquid pulled at him with formless hands and rent apart the wishbone of his pelvis. His arms and legs dissolved to nothing. Darkness at last. A relief from pain. And Warren Groves was destroyed so utterly that not a scrap of flesh or fiber or hair remained.

  Warren Groves was a stranger in his flesh. He staggered away from the foal sac of his unnatural rebirth as young and strong as fifteen years prior. He was afraid and fled from the stinking liquid of the pool expecting to be attacked at any moment by Gideon Long. He was not. The cavern was changed. The roof was much lower and made from sagging iron beams holding back a further collapse. The walls were not natural stone but gray bricks of large size. The tunnel down which he had been dragged was marked with crude paintings that did not have an obvious meaning.

  He escaped from the tunnel convinced that he was within a dream.

  The canyon was gone. He inhabited a landscape of fractured hardpan spread out in every direction to meet the starless night sky. He had emerged from the remains of a huge stone building long ago fallen into ruin. The building was tilting and half swallowed up by the earth. It must once have been as large as any in Europe. The air he breathed was unsatisfying and hot and smelled of long-ago smoke as if the stones around him had baked in ovens.

  Beams of light like those of a lighthouse swept the sky above him. This light cast long and quivering shadows and lent motion to every detail of the world. There was no empty pueblo city of eyeless windows and powdered bones. A small shack of four walls and a roof of black shakes sat in the distance and into this was set a single square window that glowed faintly from within. He wondered if Gideon Long hid within this building. He reminded himself that it was a dream so anything might be possible.

  Warren approached the shack with caution. No figure appeared at the window but smoke issued from the tin chimney. The door he took to be made from sticks was upon closer exami
nation built from thousands of bones of every size and description. Threads of dried sinew lashed the door into a single piece that clattered gently in the desert night.

  Warren raised his hand to try to the door and immediately felt a shooting pain in his side. He reached back and found a wooden shaft piercing his flesh. He pulled and the flat arrowhead tore loose from his body with a gush of red-black blood upon the cracked hardpan. A second arrow thumped into the side of the shack and stuck in one of the shingles. A third and fourth speared into Warren’s flesh.

  “God damn it,” he said and he fell to his knees and tried to spot who was killing him.

  Three figures rose from the hardpan. They wore cloaks to conceal their bodies on the empty plain. Their faces were hidden by the savage animal heads that topped the cloaks. They made a strange cry and drew out long knives and advanced upon Warren as he pulled at another of the arrows stuck into his gut.

  Realizing they meant to finish their work he got to his feet and pulled open the door of bones. The shack was very hot and lit by the faint pulse of embers through the grate of a potbellied stove. He fell inside the tiny abode and shut the door behind him. There was no mechanism to lock it. A barricade would be the only means to keep the Indians out.

  The shack was stuffed with furniture in great disrepair and books printed in some heathen language Warren could not decipher. Tables and shelves were crowded with glass jars. These contained various samples of herbs and insects and pickled animals unknown to Warren. There were also signs of violence. Splashes of blood that were still wet to his touch. A hank of tacky hair clung to a bookcase packed with jars of fluttering insects.